Revenant
by the anomaly
Summary: Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.- David Sedaris. Post-8x23 AU. Sam completes the Trials. Dean lives. The angels undergo metamorphosis. Dean/Sam. Warning: Incest and suicidal ideation. Spoilers for the first ten seasons.


**Disclaimer:** Not real, not mine, not making money from this.

 _I am a part of all that I have met;  
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'  
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades  
For ever and for ever when I move._

\- "Ulysses" by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Dean takes stock of the prerequisite blades and firearms and tumblers of holy water, canisters of salt and rows of silver bullets fallen in like obedient soldiers, the now useless anti-possession charms dangling from a corner of the trunk winking at him and possibly daring him to bloody murder. He tugs on them but they refuse to give. Well. Something needs to be done about those. Oh, and Sam. Something needs to be done about Sam, slumped over in the passenger seat, face gaunt and hair askew, his shirt front darkening steadily from cradling the hand Dean hadn't come in time to stay. Sam who had gotten himself killed, _again_ , the fucker.

He drags Sam out of the car, heaves him up into his arms and kicks the door shut with the back of his heel. Sam's bloody hands leave a messy trail on his jeans and his legs chime loudly against every fucking doorway they ease through. Dean half-expects Sam to groan awake and blink hazily up at him, the way he would when he waited at the cusp of consciousness for Dean to tell him, yeah it's okay, we're all good, and then sigh back into sleep, unspooling like a stray thread that had caught onto a chipped fingernail but had finally broken free. He deposits Sam on the bed.

He needs a drink. Cool glass to palm, one liquid sloshing against another, the blood coming to a standstill in Sam's veins. Since when did he reason the need for a drink? A man gets what he wants, and that, for the moment, is his fingers snug around a bottle's neck.

He's got Sam sitting up in his bed, folded in half, his head lolling to the side like a ship listed to starboard, the North Star twinkling out. His hands are upturned, empty. He could fill them up with, you know, whatever. Candy ropes, rocket greens, a knife dripping with demon blood, anything to get his brother breathing again. He prepares a demon summoning ritual, then remembers that there are no demons to summon, no angels to pray to, and with characteristic swagger sweeps the entire spectacle across the room.

And what _would_ Sam want? Dean strikes items off a list of things that have run the gamut of Sam's appetite. Stanford, monster chicks, those chocolate things on sticks covered with peanuts that he just wouldn't let up on, clamouring after the ice-cream truck with the lungs of a five year old, an insatiable wanting to Dean's nine-year-old mask of mortification. Now Sam only wants burying. Dean's just about getting used to the idea; he only needs a minute, he thinks, just a minute please. Also, that drink's going to help. But for now, the boy's staying in bed. He chokes down a laugh. It's a funny thing.

So. It's a funny thing, being dead and actually _staying_ dead. Sam keeps glancing over his shoulder as he paces the corridors of the bunker, half-expecting a stinging spray of salt and holy water (is there a part of him that's still a demon? Ghostly-demon, demonic-ghost, in unequal proportions?), looking for the fire climbing up his arms when his corpse gets torched (for real this time, not just the living flame that had scorched his insides something awful even as it resembled innocuously bad CGI), but most of all he watches for Dean, Dean yanking him back by the scruff of his collar, angrily, affectionately, somewhere in between, perhaps, into the world of the living. He wonders where Cas is, if he had succeeded in closing the gates of heaven and locking himself in with those sons of bitches. He misses Cas but can't put a name to loss; it's like feeling has somehow miscarried and reason has left the building and all there is left is Dean. Dean drinking way too much, Dean not eating enough. Dean screaming bloody murder in his sleep and the cold chassis of a gun phasing through his fingers (sometimes he forgets he's a ghost) when he actually thinks about going to his brother's rescue. On those insomniac nights the thud of Dean's bare feet on cool cement sends reverberations through the floor which rope their way about his ankles. Otherwise, sensation is strangely muted. The edge of a blade pale and watery against his wrist (no, Sammy, you can't die _twice_ you twat), the sheets on Dean's bed dry as leaves, whiskey smelling like soda that had gotten flat. It's a funny thing, standing behind Dean and staring at those short hairs on the back of his head and not being caught for snooping (he really thinks he is snooping and feels guilty for it). It's not a bad thing, he admits, the vantage of being dead, but being unembarrassed for affection is something Sam still needs getting used to.

Then there's the odd glimpse of things that are certainly out of place in an underground bunker. A wisp of light, flickering. A tree standing watch in the corner of the library, its branches gnarled and patient. At first he had thought it was the remnants of Lucifer fucking around with his mind, but then it hit him that _he has no mind_ , none of the corporeal sort that was the breeding ground for hallucinations, anyway, errant neurons misfiring, a hand stapled together before being torn to shreds. This is for real, he thinks, and there it is again, a fiery red aurora bright and accusing as it spreads from the ceiling and fills the room, berating him for some grievous wrong he has yet to commit. The tree shaking its head, low and mournful and in full agreement. Murmurs of misplaced promises and other saccharine shit in two-part harmony. Jesus.

Dean comes home and stalks off to his room, weaving a fresh set of muddy boot prints into those of last week's. Sam winces. He hasn't quite figured out how to open a door.

There are some things which transcend space and time. Faults, for instance, sins that revisit the ones we love best. He supposes Dean is thinking of exactly the same thing. Perhaps their generation of hunters will not be the last to remember how it was like after a messy application of Ruby's knife, when a demon had left a vessel but the body still clung on to life, some senseless sound passing its lips that made no mark whatsoever upon the world, a name, a word. What did it matter, that sometime in the future a wife wept for her husband lying gutted on their living room floor because of a wretched angel's twisted compulsion to atone for his error? Did Sam manage to avert that or does time hurry us all towards the inevitable end despite our petty machinations? The lives we take, the hearts we ruin (our own included), the angels who shake our hands and depart with a trace of our faults and leave us with a little of their grace. Sam feels hollowed out, like the empty shell of that fake/real haunted house they razed to the ground. The tree watches.

Dean, by the way, is not thinking of anything in particular at all, unless you count the colour of Sam's hair fresh from the shower, his cheeks dimpled pink.

He can smell the sweet sick scent of vampire blood that he had brought back to the bunker. The tips of his fingers are a familiar rusty brown. His jacket reeks. If he could just summon the energy to peel it off. His back complains but Dean ignores it. After that brief spurt of physical exertion, his muscles seem to protest any movement. Besides, it's perfectly acceptable to lapse back into inertia after having accomplished something so specific as making a nest of vamps bite the dust. Here is where I decapitated five fangs, on such and such a day, at such and such a time. He doesn't need a curse to excuse his actions. He can kill as and when and as much as he likes, without Sam's disapproving glare and his treatises on vampire rights and all that.

He could sleep, if not for that stupid song that's been playing itself over and over in his ear. He must be going mad, Dean thinks, it's finally his turn to lose his marbles. And to make things worse, it's nowhere near the legitimate classic rock on those tapes he has not the heart to play in the car anymore. It's some chick ballad thing with piano accompaniment that is too gross to even recall.

Every time Sam goes on one of his sojourns, demon-chick, damaged vet-chick, soulless run, the list goes on, Dean thinks this might be the time that's actually it. He builds a fiction of a life with Lisa and Ben and Sam comes back. He gets fucking stuck in Purgatory and Sam never shows. He takes a drive and Sam goes postal, stumbling down the highway in bare feet, waving a revolver in his hand and mumbling bullshit, his eyes roving the horizon for the next horror, and the next, and the next, until Dean manhandles him into the car as he screams and sobs, limbs flailing wildly before abruptly falling dumb, apologetic and ashamed. As always Dean waits for something monumental to happen, but nothing does. The world goes on, coolly uninvolved. He grabs the keys and drives until he reaches the most disagreeable motel he can find and yells his throat raw as he thrashes a room and Sam still refuses to come back. As a final touch he hurls the bedside lamp at the window. It splinters and the cool night air rushes in. Good. At least that's happening as it should. He tips over the table, dislocates a couple of legs from a chair. Might as well make the best of it since everything's gone to shit anyway.

His escape from the motel is uneventful. He legs it before the manager comes, but not before leaving the money for damages on the battered table, the last dregs of conscience laying claim to him, Sam's mocking grin. The wind greets his face, frank and honest in its reproach. He decides it can take its punctilious sermon and go to hell. No more songs now, huh, when it's reached the end of its patience? It seethes and hisses as it gathers up the night in preparation for morning, which breaks rosily just as Dean kills the engine and stalks back into the bunker. The bottle of scotch is right where he had left it.

Sam feels strangely relieved. Dean, he says, _Dean_ , the same way he did when they were trapped in the Impala after it was totalled by the Yellow-Eyed Demon, helpless and petrified, his brother bleeding out in the back of the car and he capable of nothing but a regression to infancy and instinct. For a terrifying moment there was no answer, not even a moan of acknowledgement, and Sam knew he was being punished by finally getting what he wanted all along, everybody dead and him left alone to do as he pleased, another one of his sins yet to be accounted for. Then of course Sam wised up, stumbled out of the car and checked that his brother was still breathing before dialling 911.

Dean thinks, perhaps it would have been better if they'd all died there and then. Three neat bodies on a pyre, nobody burning nobody's corpse.

To be hanged first, and then to confess. Sam will spend all of his life pouring his poisons into unwilling ears, destined to be condemned and then reconciled only to be condemned again. He plunges his fingers deeper into Kevin Tran's empty eye sockets. He stabs Charlie repeatedly in the abdomen. He feels the steady pulse of Alexander Sarver tread itself out. The light flares as he drives the blade deeper into the man's throat, another life taken by his righteous hand. The tree begs pardon but there is none to give, the sin being yet to come. We don't talk about what happened before the Cage, about Ruby and Lilith and all those vessels he saved; that's all been paid for. The boy king, the sacred lamb, Lucifer's hobby horse. Sam is under no pretensions. No verbal penance will absolve him of his transgressions, nor any amount of his blood force-fed to Crowley, who had promptly placed trigger to temple after Sam administered the final dose. The last thing he had seen before blacking out was the wide expanse of Crowley's haunted gaze, and the sweet satisfaction of choice.

Cas was to be proven wrong; there are some things worth the loss of a single individual after all.

Growing up, Sam had always been aware of his tussle for autonomy hampering Dean's neediness to be needed. Maybe this was what it was all about, not angels and demons and the end of the world, but two brothers' sense of self tragically intertwined, Sam marked out as a magnet for destruction and Dean's compulsion to pull him out of fires over and over. At the church he had set his heart on being the one who did the saving for the second and final time. Maybe all that talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel was an unwitting façade for the bartering of his own unworthiness in exchange for shutting the gates of Hell. A worthy exchange, one must admit. Dean of all people would understand. After all, it was the same unworthiness that plagued them both (when someone sells their soul for you, it pretty much sets the stage for unworthiness). Sam has never believed he was worth saving, has never wanted to be cradled out of a burning crib any more than he wanted to be kissed roughly against a motel wall, Dean's five o'clock shadow grazing his face and his own palms hard against the seat of his brother's jeans.

Now that might have pissed Dean off, if only the object of wrath was still alive. He would shove an angel down Sam's throat to make that happen. Fuck, he'd shove an entire continent down Sam's throat if it was necessary, just so he could fall asleep knowing he would wake up to the typical morning noises, Sam shrugging off his trainers fresh from an early run, his tracksuit clinging to his back from the workout, breakfast dangling from his fingers. The light falls in splinters through the withered leaves.

But that's all one. There are certain things beyond us, the permanence of goodbyes, the parting of ways. Dean can fight all he wants and he can never change that. He's learning, one finger of whiskey at a time. To hell with Cas, who once promised redemption and purpose. Look where that's landed him. The stubborn little bastard. Dean buries his face in the pillow.

Still the song persists. Love is a beacon in the night. Life will find a way. Shit like that. God won't the guy just shut up. Sam laughs. The door to the room is left temptingly ajar.

Now that he's dead, Sam's allowed to be as gentle as he wants. He rests his hand at the base of Dean's head, snug in that little hollow where neck meets skull and runs his fingers against the grain until he reaches skin again, and again. And Cas is here, too, isn't he, tangled somewhere in the fifth interval as Sam eases beneath the covers and fits his body to his brother's, matching hip to hip and curve to curve, folding in his limbs as he closes his eyes.

And Dean sleeps.


End file.
